Monday Mentions: Wildlife, Writer-Life & Crap-icity

Monday Mentions is the mash-up-day of all the neato-torpedo links and blogs and writer-icity crappiocca collected over the past week. So I had to share these lovely pictures taken by photographer Sherry Aldrich Sineath when she posted them in my Flickr Kitty Publishing group (thank you Sherry!). There’s a Puppy Publishing group, too–please do NOT post if you don’t want your pictures shared here or on my other venues. Yes, I’m getting a weeeee bit testy about that.

On another note, I’ve finished posting all my Ask Amy videos, to date–and have a list of questions y’all have sent. So stay tuned, new ones am a-coming atcha this week! And if you have a pressing question, feel free to post in the comments section.

LOST PET INFO

Of course, I hope that Peri-Kitty and her friends know their way home and have identification and safe places to play and enjoy the glorious sunshine and grass. So are your pets microchipped? Do they have safe outside play areas? In North Texas, coyotes come up on the back patio looking for snacks–living, breathing snacks. Seren would make one mouthful. Magic would invite the critters inside to play. So we’re very careful about outdoor excursions.

What happens when wolves, cougars, and bears disappear? You get Ohio, where coyotes cause havoc because they’re not as afraid of people as the bears and wolves that used to live here… oh, and let’s not forget the nuisance deer that aren’t getting eaten by nonhuman predators anymore.

As for cats and cancer… even if it is true… this is why we wash our hands after cleaning the litterbox, children. You learned to wash your hands from your mommies, right? That shouldn’t stop in adulthood. WASH YOUR HANDS. There, I just prevented your cancer. 😛

Every time I read that “dolphins and sea liona go to war” headline, even though I know the military has been using them, I keep getting this mental image of this battalion of dolphins going up against a huge line of sea lions in some epic lord-of-the-rings style melee battle. LOL

The real fun in this state is when you get the occasional Coydog (though with the size of the ones around here I suspect they all have a wee bit of dog in them) – not only are they not afraid of people, they seem to have a drive to outright be near them… except there’s that whole predatory instinct… I’ve heard of a few places in southern Ohio where they tell you if you go out at night, never go alone and go with a gun. It’s nuts… I’ve met coyotes in some parts of the state that aren’t as crazy, most in other states west of here aren’t nuts. But some of the ones we get here, I dunno what’s in their heads – I kinda wonder if the population boom just sort of leads to higher incidences of abnormal behavior. I mean, statistically it would make sense. The more there are, the more chances there are of one being born that’s a bit “off”. I think somebody must have finally tagged that one that got my mom’s cat because I haven’t seen him in a couple years… huge thing, came right up to the house in broad daylight.

I have, at least, been lucky enough to avoid the deer on the roads so far though. Hopefully it stays that way…

I think the dolphin program is one of the things the Navy was trying to get my sister to do, back at the end of high school when you get all the recruiter calls. They saw her test scores… it was like, that and some nuclear physics program. They really started angling when they found out she liked dolphins. Hoo boy. lol

It’s likely the coyotes and coy-dog hybrids (as well as feral dogs) breed more and more “bold” offspring because those are the ones able to survive in an environment that requires close human contact. Here in N Texas there’s still room to run and more bunnies/pet cats to eat a couple acres over.

We’ve got a population of feral hogs that devastates local farms and ranches, and they no longer have any natural enemies. They’re too big for coyotes and the wolves and mountain lions are gone. We still see the occasional bobcat.